Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday slammed India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the economy.
In a tweet on Tuesday, the top opposition leader said that people’s trust in the economy has “evaporated”, while Prime Minister Modi and his team have no “understanding” or “ability” to address the problem.
“People’s trust and confidence in the economy has evaporated. PM & his team have neither the understanding, the tools nor the ability to fix the problem. It’s only a question of time before every Indian is forced to understand this”, Rahul Gandhi, the former chief of India's main opposition party Congress, said in his tweet.
Along with the tweet, Gandhi also shared a link to an article written by former Indian Prime Minister and ace Congress leader Manmohan Singh, published in the Indian daily The Hindu on 3 August.
In the article, titled "Rebuild India’s confidence, revive the economy", Singh, along with another Congress leader, Praveen Chakravarthy, argued that India should borrow more to meet the requirements of the economy and also consider printing notes as a last resort.
Ever since early 2018, India’s economic growth has been consistently declining due to a combined impact of a crisis in the country's financial sector and the US-China trade war. India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth has fallen from 7.2 percent in the financial year 2017-18 (April 2017 – March 2018), to 4.1 percent in 2019-20. The GDP growth in 2018-19 was 6.1 percent.
The Indian economy was declining even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit and now it is projected that India will witness an economic recession. Multilateral agencies like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have projected a contraction of 3.2 percent and 4.5 percent respectively for the Indian economy.
Last week, former Finance Minister and stalwart Congress leader P. Chidambaram also questioned Modi’s handling of the economy, highlighting the problems facing some of the critical sectors of the economy, such as aviation and telecoms.
Meanwhile, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Indian government rolled out a $266 billion stimulus package in May to help businesses and industries tide over the pandemic crisis.
India’s banking regulator, the Reserve Bank of India, has pumped $126 billion in liquidity into the financial system.